For the second season in a row, national drought monitoring maps have turned increasingly dire shades of orange in an arc around Maine’s midcoast and Penobscot Bay, stretching up to the Bangor area.
Conditions were “severe” along most of the coast approaching Washington County on the latest map, released last week by U.S. Drought Monitor. Where drought intensifies, plants, pollinators, wildlife and people struggle, and over time groundwater supplies drop.
Two major weather factors have contributed to more intense drought conditions along the midcoast and Penobscot Bay area for the last two drought seasons, according to state climatologist Sean Birkel. The effects of cooler air off the Gulf of Maine can form a layer that stops rain from forming along the coast, while the jet stream nudged storm systems onto different tracks, diverting rain away from coastal Maine.
A number of times this year, a storm approaching the coast has fizzled out before arrival, according to Birkel. That can be because surface waters are cooler than inland temperatures, and as breeze moves towards shore, cooler temperatures may create a relatively stable layer that limits how much a parcel of air rises, creating an area without precipitation.
While it rains inland, the area impacted by this “marine layer” that stops precipitation from forming may only see clouds.
Areas hit hardest by drought conditions this year commonly see effects from the marine layer, according to Birkel.
In other cases, a lack of rain is more related to how storms track as they approach Maine. In the last few months, the jet stream — a fast, narrow current of air high over the globe — has tended to steer developing storm systems to the north and the south of Maine, Birkel said.
For example, this summer, historic rainfall in eastern New York and parts of Vermont was expected early on to reach Maine, but the track shifted before precipitation arrived here.
The marine layer and changing storm tracks were major factors in last year’s coastal drought, too, though Birkel said general variability in the weather has also contributed in both seasons.
Drought conditions aren’t expected to improve soon. Even recent rainfall Down East on Sunday was expected to bring only “very minimal” drought relief, according to the National Weather Service’s office in Caribou, and the potential for showers Thursday promises “little to no” drought relief.
Summer tends to be drier in Maine because of patterns in the jet stream, so it’s fairly common to see short-term droughts that can come to an end quickly, which happened in the fall of 2020.
But now, two years of drought have created a deficit in groundwater, which takes time to build back up.
The midcoast area in particular hasn’t seen groundwater fully recover from last year, according to Birkel. A state website where people report dry wells shows 74 reports in 2026 — far fewer than the 552 reported in 2025 — scattered generally along the coast.
How fast groundwater recovers has a lot to do with how much rain and snow Maine gets this fall and winter.
The coming winter is expected to bring a strong El Nino weather system, which typically means normal or above normal precipitation along with warmer temperatures. The amount of snowpack and precipitation will influence how much the state bounces back in spring, but it’s too early to say yet what might happen, according to Birkel.
